The old joke about touring musicians waking up and �wondering what town they�re in gains another dimension with Roy Hargrove.

The old joke about touring musicians waking up and wondering what town they're in gains another dimension with Roy Hargrove. The trumpeter, who's on a mission to play jazz with soul, can be excused for forgetting not only where he is, but which of his three bands he has in tow.

There's his RH Factor, which blends funk, hip hop and gospel music with jazz, and his 17-piece big band that is spreading joy and excitement across America. The outfit that concerns Scottish jazz listeners, however, is Hargrove's quintet, which brings the beautifully tempered music that features on his latest album, Earfood, to the Edinburgh International Jazz Festival this weekend.

"I do sometimes have to think for a few seconds about which band schedule I'm on," he says, "because one tour will stop and another starts right away, or there'll be dates with the big band right in the middle of a quintet tour."

Indeed - but he wouldn't have it any other way. Making CDs is all very well, but it's the bandstand where Hargrove, a believer in live music's ability to feed vitamins to player and audience, feels that jazz really belongs. It's also where this graduate of formal training courses at Berklee College of Music in Boston and the New School for Social Research in New York learned his most valuable lessons.

A natural musician who was famously spotted at his high school in Texas by the visiting trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, who promptly set him on the fast track to a career in jazz, Hargrove is all for education and developing instrumental dexterity. "You have to learn to play properly and to practise, but the end product has to be a marriage of ability and feeling," he says. "Ability allows you to communicate your ideas, but I want to mean every note, and it's always been that way for me."

As a youngster in Dallas, the Waco-born Hargrove came under the spell of a former professional drummer, Dean Hill, whose method of teaching involved showing pupils a few blues phrases, which they would go home and practise. Then, when they played a solo in the school big band, Hill would be up there beside them, cheering them on. Passion and excitement, says Hargrove, were the almost inevitable results. Growing up with a father who was an avid record collector also helped.

"I'd be listening to the Four Tops, Temptations and Earth Wind & Fire, and I really believe that what goes in your ears comes out in your playing," he says. "Listening to music also makes you receptive. It's ear training, essentially, and I think what people maybe don't realise is that ear training is 80-90% of this whole business."

He tells of nights spent playing with bands in New York, when older, more experienced musicians would call out a tune he didn't know. "I'd learn it on the spot," he says. "I learned so many practical lessons too from playing gigs with people like Joe Henderson, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Walter Booker and Clifford Jordan, guys who had helped to shape jazz. They were my mentors. Being onstage with these guys showed me how to be a grown-up."

Now, as he approaches his 40th birthday, he's passing on the legacy to the young players in his bands. Already some of the players who contributed to Earfood have moved on, with even younger replacements arriving alongside the pairing of Hargrove and saxophonist Justin Robinson, whose friendship goes back 20 years.

"I love having someone like Justin in the quintet because when you're travelling you become a family," he says. "We play together and live together and the camaraderie that develops feeds into the music, too. I think that's why Earfood sounds the way it does. We'd been working together very tightly, covering a lot of miles, and developed a kind of conversational understanding. We all knew how much or how little to say to make the music work."

It helped, too, that the tunes - without being too sweet or too neat - were so listener-friendly, with some blending the danceability of rhythm and blues with hard-bop jazz tradition and others sounding like soul ballads just waiting for lyrics. "I've always tried to sing through the trumpet," says Hargrove. "Sarah Vaughan was a big influence on my playing, especially her phrasing and choice of tunes. I think that's part of the whole thing of making music for the listener's pleasure - it's all about the listeners. Everything we do is designed to uplift the audience. Otherwise, what's the point?"

The Roy Hargrove Quintet play the Queen's Hall, Edinburgh, tomorrow.